ABSTRACT
Tests of speech, language, and hearing were given to approximately one half of the study population at age 3 (Lassman et al., 1980). A battery of psychological tests was administered in all study centers at age 4 as described in an earlier monograph (Broman et al., 1975). From the 3-year examination, summary evaluations of normal or abnormal performance in four areas were screened. Language expression was coded as abnormal if the child failed to name presented objects or to produce short sentences or meaningful phrases. Abnormal language reception was defined as failure to identify familiar objects or to understand action words or words indicating relationships and direction in space. A code of abnormal speech production reflected problems in intelligibility or fluency and unusual voice quality or poor articulation. Abnormal hearing was defined by failure on both a speech-hearing test and a three-frequency pure tone test at 20 db. All four evaluations were related to severe or mild retardation in the univariate screen.
